Revised Edition of the Fourth Commandment.
I\N a communication signed "Wardlaw," in the "Earnest Christian" of June 1864, in reference to Heb. iv, 9, we read: "In the ordinary interpretation, the spirit of this allusion, and of the analogy suggested by it, is entirely lost. There is not a vestige of it left. But interpreted as above, so completely is it preserved, that the language of God in Gen. ii, 1, 3, might, in the full spirit of it, be accommodated to the work of Jesus when he rose from the dead, and the consequent sanctification of the first day of the week. 'Thus the work of redemption was finished, and all its glorious ends secured. And on the first day of the week Jesus rose from the grave, and finally rested from the work he had done;—wherefore the ascended Lord blessed the first day and sanctified it.'" This is preparatory to a new edition of the fourth commandment; for as the fourth commandment is based on the facts recorded in Gen. ii, 1-3, so there must exist some such record as is here suggested, before any command can be framed for the first day of the week. But such a record as this would be open to a slight objection or two, which we will state: 1. The work of redemption was not finished by Christ's ministry up to the time of his resurrection. If it was, wo to the hapless generations that have lived since that time. 2. All its glorious ends were not then secured, if by secured is meant brought into actual possession of the race. Nor will they be, nor the work of redemption be finished, till all the redeemed stand together on mount Zion. 3. Christ did not rest on the first-day of the week from his work. On the contrary he continued it through the forty days of his sojourn with his disciples after his resurrection, and has been continuing to work for the redemption of man, as our great High Priest above, from that time to the present. 4. "Wherefore the ascended Lord" did not bless "the first day." 5. He did not sanctify it. Now if these five "nots" can be removed, or five facts in relation to past events be reversed, then the way is open for a command for Sunday-keeping. But even then it would be more satisfactory to us if it could be found where Christ had given us a command to keep it, than to have it left for men to frame down here in the nineteenth century to meet a perplexing exigency that has arisen in their theory.